-First, to define the next generation of graphics capabilities that are achievable with DirectX 11 PC’s and future consoles.
-Second, to deliver a toolset with an unprecedented mixture of power, ease-of-use, and polish.
-And finally, to scale the technology and its feature set up and down the spectrum of future computing devices, including iOS and Android, and mainstream PC.

NVidia: What is the target platform for UE4? What kind of hardware are gamers going to need to run UE4 based games?

Tim Sweeny: Unreal Engine 4’s next-generation renderer targets DirectX 11 GPU’s and really starts to become interesting on hardware with 1+ TFLOPS of graphics performance, where it delivers some truly unprecedented capabilities. However, UE4 also includes a mainstream renderer targeting mass-market devices with a feature set that is appropriate there.

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I'm sure tons of people here are wondering what this means for the Wii U. If the Wii U is not able to run the full feature-set of Unreal Engine 4 (dat completely realtime lighting), it will still be able to run the scaled down version which would allow ports to be possible without having to downgrade a game significantly (like on the Wii).

Well that's convenient, though I can't really see myself buying a game that's available across all three systems and the PC for the console, unless, that is, it has some feature or gimmick that's too attractive to pass up. Either way, this may bode well for the Wii U.

Consoles are more efficient with their hardware than PC's so 1+ TFLOPS should be less for a console, at the moment UE4 is PC only.
Though there is some talk about scaling it down for tablets.

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Hardly, consoles are not that much more efficient when it comes to graphics technology, most games running today on consoles have had their video settings modified heavily to run smoothly at weird resolutions. The difference between PC and console capability lies in the CPU usage as much as graphics. Consoles have lightweight operating systems, desktop OS's like Windows only use a small fraction of a graphics cards capability anyway.

Also, any graphics chip in a future console better then an AMD 5750 will be a 1 Teraflop chip, since that card in itself is 1008 Gigaflops (1.008 Teraflops). Nintendo is supposedly using a modified 5870 which means they would be running a 2.7 Teraflop graphics chip, or 2.088 Teraflops if it's actually a 5850.

Hardly, consoles are not that much more efficient when it comes to graphics technology, most games running today on consoles have had their video settings modified heavily to run smoothly at weird resolutions. The difference between PC and console capability lies in the CPU usage as much as graphics. Consoles have lightweight operating systems, desktop OS's like Windows only use a small fraction of a graphics cards capability anyway.

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I think he meant the software efficiency (what with not having to support 28 different GPU chip revisions and three types of gamepad polling along with all the other crap on a PC where a console has standardized hardware).

Also, any graphics chip in a future console better then an AMD 5750 will be a 1 Teraflop chip, since that card in itself is 1008 Gigaflops (1.008 Teraflops). Nintendo is supposedly using a modified 5870 which means they would be running a 2.7 Teraflop graphics chip, or 2.088 Teraflops if it's actually a 5850.

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All the time we see modified stuff in game systems, it's downclocked AFAIK, which means reduced performance (for reduced power drain and heat), as the benchmarks are taken at stock configs.

Hardly, consoles are not that much more efficient when it comes to graphics technology, most games running today on consoles have had their video settings modified heavily to run smoothly at weird resolutions. The difference between PC and console capability lies in the CPU usage as much as graphics. Consoles have lightweight operating systems, desktop OS's like Windows only use a small fraction of a graphics cards capability anyway.

Click to expand...

I think he meant the software efficiency (what with not having to support 28 different GPU chip revisions and three types of gamepad polling along with all the other crap on a PC where a console has standardized hardware).

Also, any graphics chip in a future console better then an AMD 5750 will be a 1 Teraflop chip, since that card in itself is 1008 Gigaflops (1.008 Teraflops). Nintendo is supposedly using a modified 5870 which means they would be running a 2.7 Teraflop graphics chip, or 2.088 Teraflops if it's actually a 5850.

Click to expand...

All the time we see modified stuff in game systems, it's downclocked AFAIK, which means reduced performance (for reduced power drain and heat), as the benchmarks are taken at stock configs.

Hardly, consoles are not that much more efficient when it comes to graphics technology, most games running today on consoles have had their video settings modified heavily to run smoothly at weird resolutions. The difference between PC and console capability lies in the CPU usage as much as graphics. Consoles have lightweight operating systems, desktop OS's like Windows only use a small fraction of a graphics cards capability anyway.

Click to expand...

I think he meant the software efficiency (what with not having to support 28 different GPU chip revisions and three types of gamepad polling along with all the other crap on a PC where a console has standardized hardware).

Also, any graphics chip in a future console better then an AMD 5750 will be a 1 Teraflop chip, since that card in itself is 1008 Gigaflops (1.008 Teraflops). Nintendo is supposedly using a modified 5870 which means they would be running a 2.7 Teraflop graphics chip, or 2.088 Teraflops if it's actually a 5850.

Click to expand...

All the time we see modified stuff in game systems, it's downclocked AFAIK, which means reduced performance (for reduced power drain and heat), as the benchmarks are taken at stock configs.

So asking for mechanics that would improve gameplay is asking for it to be dedicated? By your logic then having an engine dedicated to graphics woupd make all games look the same.

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What? No. The post mentioned the engine itself having the gameplay features.

Look, what currently happens is that engines (generally FPS-based) are sold with a certain feature set (physics, rendering, weapon handling, script type), and then companies buy the engines and either use them as-is, or modify them to add their own features on top. There's the distinction I'm talking about.

For example Borderlands uses the Unreal Engine 3... but you don't see concepts in borderlands showing up as-is in other UE3 games. Borderlands has things like randomly-built guns with potential elemental effects, respawning bosses that drop unique guns, randomly-spawning special monster varieties, a level-up and skill points system, different special abilities for character classes (phasing into another dimension, setting up a turret, etc.), an RPG-type interface when dealing with NPCs and quests (getting money and EXP as a reward, quest progress markers), vending machines... all this shit is stuff that the team built on top of the Unreal Engine 3.

Now there's also games that use the Unreal Engine 3, and add little to no new features, coming out as generic FPS games. These games all share a small set of similar features because they're features built into the engine, which is why most of these games play the same.

The post mentioned adding a bunch of "actual gameplay" features into the engine, that would just encourage all the games to use those same basic features. I mean look at modern FPS games versus some of the earlier ones. The modern ones (like N64 onwards) DO support a lot more for actual gameplay (concept of a shield, kickback, weapon modifications like supressor, Field Of View changes when using scopes, Depth Of Field effect when using "iron" sights) than existed in older games (like Duke Nukem 3D).

The issue being that since they're built-in to modern engines and thus available to all the games using them, these types of features are used in pretty much all the games, so they no longer stand out and they seem generic. That's a reason that engines rarely include specific gameplay mechanics; if they did a majority of games would make use of them without many changes.

The engine's job is to take care of all the basic hard shit like the physics and the actual rendering (you know, having an engine that runs in realtime and takes industry-standard model and graphics and shader formats and renders them to a pretty image on the screen is osmething taken for granted for, but it's not easy to write well), all the stuff companies would rather not be dealing with when the time spent reinventing the wheel (writing their own base engine) could otherwise be spent on actual content development (making unique features, building the maps, etc.).